Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-march-29-2024-good-fri
Mark 15:33-39
The Death of Jesus
33 At noon darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.34 And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
35 When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah.”
36 One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,” he said.
37 With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.
38 The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. 39 And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”
For those of us who follow Jesus – however imperfectly – Good Friday seems like the most inappropriately named day in human history. It seems like an ‘unholy day, instead of a holy day. This day seems to mark the moral low point in human history. Good Friday marks a day when humankind met the Prince of Peace with gruesome violence. God in human form had just spent three years calling us to a way of life characterized by mutual caring, compassion and responsibility. And we responded to that message of love and caring by torturing him to death. So from that perspective, Good Friday seems pretty far from “good.”
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark helps to illuminate the rationale for the day’s counter-intuitive designation. But before we get to that, there are a couple of things about the passage that deserve some focused attention on Good Friday.
First of all, there’s a detail in the passage that seems to be largely overlooked – but it’s a detail that’s pretty significant when you think about it. In this account of the crucifixion, we’re told that people who heard Jesus cry out for the last time misunderstood what he was saying. They heard him speak the opening words of Psalm 22 in Aramaic ‘’ “Eloi, eloi!” The word means, ‘My God, my God!.’ But the bystanders misunderstood what Jesus was saying, and thought he was calling out to the prophet Elijah.
Here’s why that’s so significant: This report of a misunderstanding shows that the person who related the story told it exactly as they witnessed it. This is the kind of “extraneous information” that helps to support the historical accuracy of the gospel story. This reported misunderstanding doesn’t add anything to the story from a theological perspective. But it does help to establish that it’s an eyewitness account. If someone had made up this story, they wouldn’t have put in a detail like this misunderstanding, because it serves no purpose in advancing the narrative. So it’s evidence that the story was an eyewitness account that was reported just as it happened.
The second thing that strikes me as especially meaningful here in this reading is what Mark and Peter tell us about the reaction of the Roman centurion who was present. They report that this centurion witnessed the death of Jesus and concluded that he was in fact the Son of God. A Roman centurion would have been a hardened professional soldier. He made his living enforcing Roman order. So he would have no reason to be sympathetic to an itinerant Jewish rabbi from some backwater town up north. But somehow the Spirit revealed something to this centurion that most people missed. Maybe because as a gentile, the centurion didn’t carry around patriotic expectations about what the Messiah would be like, so he was able to see a truth that most of the Hebrew ‘insiders’ missed.
And to get back to the question of why Good Friday is good, there’s a really important clue in the passage, it seems to me. Verse 38 says, “The curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom.”
That curtain separated the main chamber of the temple from the inner sanctum – the “Holy of Holies.” It was in this inner sanctum that the Ark of the Covenant had once sat. The Jews understood this inner sanctum to be God’s ‘throne room,’ from which he reigned over all the earth. God was regarded as being present there in some special way, and it was considered so holy that even the priests stayed out. Only once a year a priest was chosen by lot to go in and re-consecrate the area. So the point of this curtain was that it protected humankind by keeping us separated from God.
But at the moment of Jesus’ death, this curtain was torn from top to bottom. At that moment, the barrier between God and humankind was ripped away once and for all. From that moment forward, those who follow the crucified Jesus were given direct access to God. That means that from that moment on, no priest – no human intermediary – would ever again be needed between God and his Son’s followers. Since the dawn of God’s relationship with his people, human priests had sacrificed animals as a payment for the people’s sins. But Jesus became a unique priest who sacrificed himself once and for all time as a payment for the sins of all humankind.
God took the most grotesque and evil act in human history, and he turned it around to make it the means by which we gained direct access to him. God took the ultimate act of evil and by his grace transformed it into an instrument of the ultimate good.
So that’s why it’s ‘Good Friday.’ It marks the day on which God took the worst moment in human history and made it the beginning of a new movement working to establish his kingdom – the ultimate good in the universe.
Let’s pray. Lord, on this Good Friday, we remember the great sacrifice you made at the cross, and we thank you for that great demonstration of your love. We thank you also that by that sacrifice, you opened the way for us to approach you directly as children approach a loving Father. Amen.
Grace and Peace on this day, and a Joyous Easter to you!
Henry
Recent Comments